Chinese government IT delegation hears about IPv6 progress

Published: 16 November 2011

Twenty-four senior directors from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology visited ECS-Electronics and Computer Science last week to hear about the UK’s deployment of IPv6 from Dr Tim Chown, a leading expert in IPv6, the next generation of Internet address protocols.

Dr Chown has been an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which has been working on IPv6 since the mid-1990s. In preparation for the advent of IPv6, the work carried out by Dr Chown and his colleagues in ECS has ensured that IPv6 has been standardized and that operational experience has been fed into the development process. Today IPv6 support is available in almost all modern router and operating system platforms, including Windows 7, MacOS X and Linux.

The data network in ECS runs both IPv4 and IPv6 alongside each other, a method known as dual-stack, and many of the ECS public-facing services including web, mail and DNS are available via IPv6 as well as IPv4. The deployment in ECS has helped validate the IETF protocols and their implementations by showing that IPv6 can be run successfully alongside IPv4 in production networks.

In addition to hearing about this progress from Dr Chown, the Chinese delegation were also able to hear about advances in new technology for wireless communications from Professor Lie-Liang and Professor Lajos Hanzo of ECS. Professor Hanzo is involved in the UK-China Science Bridges R&D on Wireless Mobile Communications which has the ultimate goal of creating a UK-China Joint R&D Centre for Future Wireless Communication Networks, and is funded by the UK Research Councils to facilitate the collaboration of British and Chinese academic institutions. Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, UK Open Government Data Adviser, also spoke on the advances made in the provision of public data in the UK and throughout the world, enabling citizens to benefit from access to government and business data.

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For further information about this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 3212.